Creativity and the A-ha moment

Watson and Crick saw the structure of DNA in a spiral staircase, and Newton understood gravity in the falling of an apple—but all human beings regularly experience flashes of inspiration, seemingly out of nowhere. Insight researchers want to know more about the nature of the so-called ‘a-ha moment’, so they are setting us a citizen science challenge. Find out what they know already, and how you can contribute to the science of creativity. And we hear from a neuroscientist whose recent research shows that the most creative people have superior connectivity between three distinct brain regions.

Transcript

Lynne Malcolm: When did you last have that flash of creative inspiration?

Maggie Webb: I'm actually keeping a list of what different disciplines used to call it but I would call it the a-ha moment.

Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm and today we explore our brain's creative networks, and the a-ha moment.

Maggie Webb: The most classic is the eureka moment because we still use that term, eureka, from Archimedes being in the bath. Other moments that we would be aware of would be the apple falling on Newton's head and then this leading to the theory of gravity.

Lynne Malcolm: And then there's Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA.

Maggie Webb: And they saw a spiral staircase and they go, oh, okay, this is the double helix, and this was their a-ha moment for how DNA could be mapped into our bodies.

Lynne Malcolm: Maggie Webb is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences. She's passionate about investigating the a-ha moment and its relationship to creativity and problem solving. She's excited that this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the scientific study of insight, and the so-called a-ha moment. This first research into insight learning was conducted by German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler in Spain. He was studying the behaviour of chimps.

Maggie Webb: In one of these experiments he had placed a bunch of bananas just out of their reach in this cage, and they were trying to reach them in all different manners of ways that they would normally do, but they just couldn't reach them and they couldn't jump up to retrieve this fruit, and there was this box that he'd put in the cage with them. It wasn't directly under the fruit, it was just in the corner. And despite all their jumping and flailing about, they couldn't reach it, and this one chimp sat down, all bowed and hunched over because he can't reach it and he wants to, and he stays there for a couple of minutes, and then suddenly he jumps up, puts the box under the fruit, jumps onto the box, grabs the bananas and eats them, pretty much in one moment. And this was really the first time that we had been thinking about a-ha moments and insight in this way. Before then, the discipline was very within a kind of trial and error system, so you would only do anything if you'd done it in incremental fashion, so like a reinforcement fashion, so if I slowly teach myself to move the box under the bananas. But this was a total game changer.

Lynne Malcolm: So the chimp was suddenly seeing the big picture.

Maggie Webb: Absolutely, he suddenly had it in his hand.

Lynne Malcolm: So how has that experiment influenced the research into the next 100 years into insight?

Maggie Webb: So that experiment really framed how we think about it in science, that it's not this incremental stepping towards a solution, that it's possible that there is a totally different cognitive process that we arrive at insights through. So it totally shifted the way that we think about problem-solving for the last 100 years. And then going into the future it still remains this question in many respects as to whether it is a distinct process or not. It's not a completely answered question.

Lynne Malcolm: Maggie Webb. Later in the program we'll hear about the A-Ha! Challenge. It's a project calling on us all to share our experiences of insight, to help scientists find out more about a-ha moments and how they relate to our creative and problem solving abilities. First though, let's explore our creative brain.

Roger Beaty is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Penn State University in the US, and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab there.

Roger Beaty: In the psychology and neuroscience literature, creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with novel and useful ideas. The definition of creativity in that frame is the ability to come up with something new that hasn't really been introduced or existed on a large scale before, and it actually also solves some kind of problem, so it's useful, so it's a two-part thing; it's the ability to come up with something new and the ability to come up with something that also fits a given context or goal.

Lynne Malcolm: Roger Beaty has focussed his research on the neural and cognitive bases of creativity, and the differences between the brains of creative and less creative people.

Roger Beaty: So a lot of the work I've done so far has focused on the role of different brain networks and their interactions associated with creative performance. And usually when I'm talking about creativity I'm talking about performance on general verbal creative tasks that present people with an open-ended problem or prompt and asks them to come up with different possible solutions to it. So we are mostly investigating divergent thinking, and what I've been looking into is the role of a different brain networks and their interactions.

Lynne Malcolm: In a study published in 2018, Roger Beaty and his colleagues had 163 participants complete a classic test of divergent thinking in which they are asked to come up with new and unusual uses for objects. For example, a sock could have the common use of foot warming, which would get a lower score, or it could be used as a water filtration system, which would score more highly. The participants were asked to perform these tasks whilst their brains were scanned in an fMRI machine. Roger Beaty and his colleagues identified three distinct brain networks involved in creativity; the default mode network, the executive control network and the salience network.

Roger Beaty: The default mode network is associated with very many different types of cognition that involve spontaneous thinking or self-referential thinking. It's called the default mode because it's activated in a brain scanner and people are just relaxing and not presented with a task, so they are letting their minds wander to different topics and ideas. It is associated with remembering past experiences, thinking about possible future experiences, just daydreaming and so forth, and so that's one network that we've found is associated with creativity.

But there's two other ones, so one other network is called the executive control or cognitive control network, and this network comes online when we have to focus our attention and cognitive resources on more demanding tasks that require us to hone our attention and manage multiple things in mind at one time, directing the contents of our thoughts. And so the interesting thing about these two networks in particular is they typically don't work together. So when one network is activated in the brain scanner, the other network tends to deactivate. So, for example, when we are mind-wandering or just thinking about whatever we like, the default network tends to show increased activation and the cognitive control network tends to deactivate because we only need to pay focused attention to anything at that time. Likewise, when we need to pay close attention and focus on something in the environment, this control network activates and the default network deactivates, so there's this antagonistic or negative correlation between the two.

And the third network is the salience network, and it actually plays an important role in general in switching between the two. So it's called salience because it helps us to pick up on salient information in the environment or internally. So one thing that we think that the salience network might be doing is switching between an idea generation mode, which is more of a default process, and the idea of valuation mode, which is more of a controlled way of thinking. And what we've found in a recent study is that people who show stronger connections between these three different brain networks tended to come up with more original ideas and we've kind of interpreted this as potentially reflecting the ability to switch between this kind of spontaneous mode of thinking and this more controlled mode of thinking.

Lynne Malcolm: And so you found creative people had more ability to switch between…more connection between the networks. Can you just explain further the mechanism that is operating between these brain networks?

Roger Beaty: So we found that across many different brain regions that were within these three networks, that those who were better able to co-activate or exchange information between these three networks produced more original ideas. So we recorded what their ideas were in the scanner, and then we used statistical prediction modelling in order to build a brain network model that was able to relatively accurately predict who was more less creative in the sample just by knowing what the pattern of connections were in their brain.

Another strength of this study is that we applied this model of connections to new participants who weren't used in the original study, and we tried to estimate what their creative thinking ability would be, just by knowing what their connections were. And we found a modest correlation. So I think this is suggestive and encouraging that we can pick up on individual differences in creative thinking ability, at least on this very general and basic task, but there's still a lot more to learn a lot of the variance that was not explained in this study, so I think that is encouraging and also exciting for future research.

Lynne Malcolm: So really creative people have different ways and rates of producing output, for example. In the field of art I believe that Cezanne is known to have been more controlled and logical in his production of his art, whereas Picasso was known to be more spontaneous. What's the difference there?

Roger Beaty: Well, I think there's room for different creative styles to be at play, and they might interact with the different modes of creativity and different domains. So, for example, in abstract art the conceptualisation of the constraints on performance are probably a little bit lower. When we talk about constraints, that's going to be more of something that's kind of a controlled and logical way of thinking, that could be something that this controlled network in the brain is helping to carry out.

So presumably it would be nice that we could actually scan Picasso's brain and find out if he had a more active default mode network but I would venture a guess that that would be the case in someone who is very imaginative and very spontaneous and able to generate a lot of things on the fly, whereas other people who may be have to be a little bit more refined and directed in their artwork or they just tend to do that might rely more on a controlled network. But this is the neuroscience perspective on things, and there's definitely other ways to think about it.

Lynne Malcolm: You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today we're exploring the brain processes involved in creativity. Neuroscientist from Penn State University, Roger Beaty, is also investigating how memory plays a part in creativity.

Roger Beaty: On the one hand memory is absolutely critical for creativity. To become an expert in anything you have to spend years studying the rules of your trade, getting a sense for what has already been done, building up this big database of information that you can draw upon when you're coming up with new ideas. On the other hand, we know through a lot of laboratory studies that memory can also constrain creativity because creativity requires, by definition, the generation of something new, and memory is the representation of something that is old and already known.

So one way to think about this is possibly through how memories are structured and accessed. So it could be that there is a certain…I mean, there's some evidence to suggest that the way the concepts are stored in our memory play a role in how we can piece them together in new ways. So there's different organisations of different concepts in semantic memory and that could be playing a role in how people come up with new ideas. But on the other hand, if you are too fixated on what you already know or what's the current state of the problem you're working on, then that can interfere with the ability to move forward and come up with new ideas. And that's really semantic memory.

More recently there has been some focus on episodic memory. And so semantic memory on the one hand is knowledge for facts and concepts, and episodic memory is memory for personal experiences and episodes, so autobiographical memory, and vivid scenes that we can recall and construct when we are imagining new future experiences, and this is something that we've been studying is the role of episodic memory and simulation in different kinds of creativity.

Lynne Malcolm: So what is known about the level of creativity across a person's life span? So, for example does creativity increase or diminish as people age?

Roger Beaty: This is actually something that is not very well-known. It's a recent topic, the extent to which creativity changes with age, because on the one hand older adults have acquired much more information throughout the years and this knowledge base can be used to draw upon to come up with new ideas. The evidence so far, at least on general creative thinking abilities, is very mixed. Some studies have shown that older adults show lower performance on creative thinking tasks, some have shown actually the opposite and some have shown no differences. So it's a very early stage and there really needs to be kind of a meta-analysis on this, but I think we could make different predictions about why older adults might actually be more creative because they have access to more information, more wisdom and more experiences to draw on.

Lynne Malcolm: So can our level of creativity be improved with training?

Roger Beaty: Yes, I think this is a very important question to come out of the work that we've been doing and others have been doing because the work so far has been correlational, we are observing a pattern of brain activity or connectivity that's correlated with creative performance. However, we really need longitudinal and educational intervention studies to actually see if people can be trained to be more creative over time, and the extent to which this corresponds to changes in brain connectivity, particularly within these three networks. So I think potentially looking at how someone's brain changes through actually just conventional training in the arts and in the sciences really hasn't been done so far, and I think there's important work to be done there, and I think there's a lot more to be known about how we can teach for creativity, in a sense, how we can actually train people to be more creative in general, and the extent to which this creative teaching changes the wiring the brain for creativity.

Lynne Malcolm: Roger Beaty, Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University.

And now to that intriguing flash of creative inspiration, the a-ha moment. Maggie Webb:

Maggie Webb: That feeling that you get when you're trying to solve a problem and you suddenly go, 'Oh, I've got it.' No matter how you get there and no matter whether it's right or wrong, this is the thing that I'm really interested in, that feeling associated with the way that your world might have changed when you realise something. And for me, the first time I really got interested in this was actually…well, actually when a friend of mine was in the middle of a psychotic breakdown, and they were having these feelings of insight and they were co-occurring with things that seemed kind of random to me. They were having these feelings of insight and they were building into delusions. And so this a-ha moment was really actually changing the way that they saw the world and the way that they understood the world, and this was a big moment for me because I was like, wow, okay, so the way that your world has shifted has totally co-occurred with this emotion, how else can that shift the way that anybody sees the world?

Lynne Malcolm: So that link between creativity and mental illness that is a popular belief, is that something that you're interested in investigating as well?

Maggie Webb: Oh absolutely, absolutely, yes. So most of the time I will do research in a nonclinical population, so a healthy population, and I can use something like a measure of what's called schizotypy, which is a subclinical measure of schizophrenia, so it's more like a personality questionnaire. And I would give this to people and look at how their levels of creativity or how often they have a-ha moments might co-occur with higher measures on this scale.

Lynne Malcolm: What's known about who is more likely to have a-ha moments?

Maggie Webb: Very little. This is a fairly new area of research. Although we've been doing research in insight for 100 years, most the time it has actually been looking at your ability to solve problems that are this sort of restructuring problem. So when you solve a problem with insight, what it has traditionally meant is that you leap to this solution rather than walking towards it in an incremental way. But we haven't focused much as a literature on this a-ha moment, so very little is known. I have some data on whether you are what's called open to experiences. So if you tend to go out and look for things in your environment and try to experience new things, then you are more likely to have an a-ha moment. And also in some contexts this schizotypy. So if you tend to see patterns, so if you tend to see, for example, faces in clouds, then you are a bit more likely to have a-ha moments as well.

Lynne Malcolm: And how important is the a-ha moment in the creative process? Does a really good creative breakthrough always include an a-ha moment, or can creativity be a slow, gradual process?

Maggie Webb: That's such a good question. I would say it's both because moments of insight are definite drivers towards something that you might be doing. But you might have this moment of insight, for example, and you're like, oh, I know exactly what I want to create, but then you have to sit down and totally work in a concentrated and incremental fashion towards the rest of your goal. So it might be that moment of insight that gives you the drive to create this thing but you still need both of those capabilities to create a masterpiece.

Lynne Malcolm: And are there particular conditions that we know about already that make an a-ha moment more likely?

Maggie Webb: Yes and no. This is why it's so exciting for me because it's such a nascent area of research. So an a-ha experience is more likely…well, definitely when you've solved the problem, when you have these different types of personalities. Also when you have the wrong answer in your head first. So you need to have a different idea of what's going on for it to be a sudden 'oh, oh, I've got it!' So, for example, when you're working towards something and you're like, 'Why isn't it working? This should be working, I don't understand why it's not working.' And then you find the little thing that's been just blocking it all up, and you go, 'Oh, okay, a-ha, I've got it now, finally.'

Lynne Malcolm: And what are the feelings and emotions that people report when they experience this moment of insight?

Maggie Webb: Usually quite positive, things like they will report surprise and pleasure and confidence in their solution. They will also be quite happy and they'll be relieved, like 'yes!', it's this relaxation that's associated with finally getting to this answer, this feeling of resolution.

But a-ha moments are not always positive because sometimes they are…well, not negative but it's like a 'ugh', a 'doh' moment a friend of mine calls it, when you realise you were doing the wrong thing and you're like, 'That's why it wasn't working.' And in these cases you're just like, 'I felt stupid but relieved.' So it's generally quite positive but not always this ecstatic instant.

Lynne Malcolm: Maggie Webb and her colleagues at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences have recently launched the A-Ha! Challenge which is being funded by the federal government as part of National Science Week. They're calling on us all to take the challenge and share our a-ha experiences in problem solving. They're particularly interested in whether a-ha moments increase or decrease as we age.

Maggie Webb: Our goals are really to see whether a-ha moments do change across different ages, and what we're doing is we are presenting people with some of the classic problems that are used in the literature, so riddles and brain teasers, but also some problems that we have been developing in our lab, and some problems that we've used from other literatures that will elicit a-ha moments but so far have not been presented in this context. So we are really excited, we are hoping that this has a really broad application so that anybody can do it, and that will give us some information to be able to say, okay, maybe children have more a-ha moments or maybe retirees have more a-ha moments, and we can really see this range, or maybe it's the same, maybe everybody has a-ha moments in equal amounts, we don't know.

Lynne Malcolm: Can you give me an example of the type of task that you are putting out there?

Maggie Webb: We've got quite a few different types of tasks. So one of the most commonly used in the literature at the moment is called a compound remote associate, and these tasks are word puzzles. And you're given three words. So, for example, if I gave you the term potato, heart, and tooth, and then the task is to find the word that meaningfully combines with each of those words. So in this case it would be 'sweet'. So you've got sweet potato and sweetheart and sweet tooth.

Lynne Malcolm: Ah, okay.

Maggie Webb: Yes, that sort of 'oh' moment. So that's a really commonly used problem type, but because that's so verbal, that kind of skews the way people can answer, and so we have other types of problems that we can look at as well. So some of them are like matchstick arithmetic they're called, and so you're trying to fix an equation that is written out in Roman numerals using matchsticks, just by moving one matchstick.

Lynne Malcolm: And how do you measure these a-ha moments?

Maggie Webb: It's really subjective measurements at the moment. There are some physiological correlates. So, for example, your galvanic skin response should react, and people tend to laugh actually when they have a-ha moments, and there are different things you can track, but there's very little data on this, and it's, again, this new and exciting area of research.

Lynne Malcolm: How might research into creativity, problem-solving and the a-ha moment be of most value to society?

Maggie Webb: In quite a few ways I think. So the a-ha moment is associated with motivation. There has been some interesting research in mathematics in schools. So in a classroom environment there was a paper by Liljedahl that was published in 2005 and he was investigating a group of people who didn't want to learn mathematics, they had to do it for part of their course, and whether or not they had a-ha moments. And those who had a-ha moments got really…they got into mathematics after a while. So they'd had this aha moment, they'd realised actually this can be fun, and this can be something that is not easy but I can be competent at. And so having these a-ha moments drove them towards learning more. So an a-ha moment can be associated with motivation in that way. It's also associated with better memory for things, so there were some really nice studies run a couple of years ago looking at your ability to recall things, and the increases in memory that you get when you have had an a-ha moment. So two areas in education where it can be really useful.

Lynne Malcolm: And is it likely that this research could help people increase the number of a-ha moments that they can have?

Maggie Webb: I think it can increase. There have been some papers investigating increasing the a-ha moments that people have, and there are things like looking for every possible answer for a situation, and following those through, not just the typical answer you think it is. And also looking for contrary instructions. So if this was the opposite, what would that be? And then these sorts of things can increase a-ha moments.

Lynne Malcolm: Maggie Webb, Postdoctoral Fellow in psychological sciences at the University of Melbourne. She and her colleagues are keen for you to participate in the A-Ha! Challenge, so if you're up for it head to abc.net.au and search for All in the Mind, there you'll find the link to the A-Ha! Challenge. It will run throughout August, so get those creative juices flowing.

Roger Beaty, the neuroscientist we heard from earlier, expresses his creativity as a jazz pianist, improvisation style. How has his research into the creative brain networks influenced his playing?

Roger Beaty: While I'm improvising I actually spend a lot of time introspect in on how my own creative process works and I think that has been one area of inspiration to me, is thinking about how that works and how I come up with some different ideas, at least in the context of improvisation. But it's mostly just for fun but it inspires some ideas for how I think creativity might work.

Lynne Malcolm: Do you feel like you can feel those networks interacting?

Roger Beaty: Yes, it's very much a default mode thing I think, like improvisation is very spontaneous, but not always. There's some incremental planning involved, I think there's some foresight as you're going along and seemingly coming up with things out of nowhere, there's a lot of memory retrieval involved, there's a lot of monitoring of how am I doing, where do I want to go next with this. So it's not just one network or another, it might just be a different interplay of all of those.

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Comments (3)

Martin Taper :

20 Aug 2019 2:44:15pm

I've been a design draughter and mechanical engineer for nearly 40 years. I can speak of my experience of solving problems often from scratch. It is both "aha" and "a known path to a solution not yet obvious". Both happen and both intertwine with each other. Sometimes the "aha" is a failure, and the incremental path is a success, other times the "aha" is just it. I most often have had both working together to find the best solution.

Martin Taper :

20 Aug 2019 2:59:32pm

As to an actual and memorable "aha" moment, I had one regarding the humble bicycle. The bicycle is an invention that makes humans move faster and easier, as to a rolling motion and a mechanical advantage. So why do we often get off our bikes and push them up a steep hill, even when we have advanced gearing systems that should make it easier than walking, but it just doesn't feel that way. My "aha" moment was realising what is going on here, and my solution is a bicycle design which finds it easier and more desirable to stay on the bike than to walk it up that steep hill - I'm working on it.

Paul E. Thomson :

20 Aug 2019 10:11:14pm

Hi Lynne,My " A-Ha " moments occur sometimes unexpectedly, like while having a shower, cleaning my teeth, or just day dreaming. I have had lots. Some small like fixing things at home, and some large like as a young architect designing a new hospital in the 1970's [ I am 74 ].I like drawing and painting and have been a volunteer art teacher for 14 years. Some persons have no creativity at all, and one student who is intellectually disadvantaged is very creative in her art work.I think you either have it or you don't. It is a gift.Good luck in your discussions.Cheers,Paul